Joshua 19:48

This is the inheritance of the tribe … of Dan In length it extends but 14 miles from Joppa to Ekron, but it was one of the most fertile tracts in the land, the cornfield and garden of southern Palestine. The dying Jacob had said of the tribe (Genesis 49:16):

"Dan shall judgehis people,

As one of the tribes of Israel.

Dan shall be a serpent by the way,

An adderin the path,

That biteth the horse heels,

So that his rider shall fall backward;"

and, as it has been observed, "the privilege of Dan was, that he was to lie in wait for the invader from the south or from the north." "A serpent," an indigenous, home-born "adder," to bite the heels of the invading stranger's horse; "a lion's whelp" (Deuteronomy 33:22), small and fierce, to "leap from the heights of Bashan," on the armies of Damascus or Nineveh. "For thy salvation, O Lord, have I waited" seems to have been his war cry, as if of a warrior in the constant attitude of expectation. Once only in the history of the tribe, so far as we know, was this expectation fully realised in the life of Samson. Stanley's Lectures, i. p. 269.